Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to efficient reclamation of pre-allocated direct memory access (DMA) memory in a computing environment.
Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. A data processing system typically includes a processor subsystem having at least one central processing unit (CPU), an input/output (I/O) subsystem, a memory subsystem and a bus subsystem. These data processing systems may include data storage systems, or disk storage systems, to process and store data. Many of these computer systems include virtual storage components and computing clusters. Computing clusters and virtual storage components are found in a variety of computing environments.
Large amounts of data have to be processed daily and the current trend suggests that these amounts will continue being ever-increasing in the foreseeable future. For the most part, computing systems face a significant challenge to meet the increasingly stringent reliability demands and while providing complex and sophisticated data storage systems. In many modern computing data storage/processing systems, certain hardware data subsystems within the computer are allowed to access and use memory independently of the central processing unit (CPU), which is referred to as direct memory access (DMA). Accordingly, it would be desirable to improve computing efficiency within the data storage systems to add physical memory, in a DMA hardware infrastructure, that may be required for high availability servers without compromising reliability and data availability.